The first thing I did when I woke up on the day after I finished my finals was open up Eclipse and start coding away. I’ve got the core functionality of the ‘Find Nearby Stops’ feature done. I just need to polish it up a little bit and do some other random things. I’m pretty sure I’ll submit the next version of TriMet Tracker to Palm within the week.

TriMet recently opened up a new API for us developers that makes it easy to find bus stops around a given location. So the next feature I would like to add is the ability for the phone to find bus stops near you. This is one that’s been requested for a long time, but I haven’t been able to implement it because getting access to the bus stop’s location data meant that I needed my own webserver, which costs money. And starving college students are short on money.

The other feature I’d like to add into the next release is being able to use the phone’s GPS to pick out your current location in the Trip Planner.

Speaking of money, I’ve added a paypal donate button on the right side. If you’ve enjoyed my app and want to compensate me or encourage me to continue developing it, please consider a small donation.

I’d also like to thank everyone that’s downloaded my app, the response has been amazing. So far I’ve gotten 2487 unique downloads. For an app that only applies to people who both live in the Portland area and own a Palm device, that number makes me very happy.

I’ve got a first version of the Trip Planner for the TriMet Tracker working. Not all the functionality is there, but it’s stable, and provides the basics. Currently, you can click on the stop ID associated with each stop and pop right into the real time tracking scene. Google maps integration isn’t here yet, but it’s on its way.

Probably going to submit it to Palm tomorrow if I don’t find any bugs.

Right now I’m working on the next version of my TriMet Tracker, which will include a Trip Planner. Exciting. My goal is to be able to provide a nice way to interact with the directions it gives. This means being able to display a map of the location of the bus stop, as well as being able to get directly to the real-time arrival info for each bus stop it tells you to go to.